Saturday, June 30, 2007
Mary Ellen Solt,
a pioneer of vispo,
has died
§
Some translations Ms. Solt
might have approved of:
Ron Padgett of Francis Picabia
Sean Bonney’s Baudelaire
§
Literary bloggers
seen as a threat
§
Of UbuWeb the Magnificent,
an interview
§
A survey of British poetry
in the 1990s
§
Scream on!
§
Reviving
The Mersey Sound
§
A NY Times obit
for Nazik al-Malaika
§
Talking with
Ric Royer
§
The 2007 Bay Area
Poetry Marathon
day 2
is today
§
Some terrific readings coming up
at Moe’s Books, in
Monday, July 2:
The Bootstrap Book of Poetic Journals
Monday, July 9:
Michael McClure & Diane DiPrima
Monday, July 23:
David Bromige & Richard Denner
§
§
§
One press
that is doing very well,
thank you
§
Viewing Christa Wolf
from the right
§
§
§
Fact & fiction
in Günter Grass’
confessions
§
Problems of the midlist
black novelist
§
§
§
Fiction vs. fiction
in the trial of
JT Leroy
§
§
Sir Salman
in the Sea of Blasphemy
§
Internationalizing graduate education
in
by teaching in English
§
§
§
Talking with
Mario Vargas Llosa
§
Last-chance attempts
to save the Barnes
§
§
The cost of “free admission”
§
1,000 films to see
before you die
Thursday, June 28, 2007
Jay Wright is not the sort of poet you would expect to see publishing with a post-avant house like Flood Editions. Although The Homecoming Singer was published by Corinth Press in 1971, Wright’s generally published with historically black presses or academic houses, such as Princeton, which issued a selected poems in 1987, or Louisiana State University, which published his collected poems, Transfigurations, in 2000. Too young to appear in the classic Arna Bontemps anthologies of black writing, Wright doesn’t show up at all in Nielsen & Ramey’s Every Goodbye Ain’t Gone: An Anthology of Innovative Poetry by African Americans. Of the mentions he receives in Aldon Nielsen’s earlier Black Chant: Languages of African-American Postmodernism, only one is not as part of a list, and that consists of three sentences in a passage about Corinth Press informing us that Wright was raised in the Southwest and was the subject of a special issue of Callaloo in 1983. Yet Arnold Adoff’s anthology, The Poetry of Black America: Anthology of the 20th Century, affords Wright more pages than it does Audre Lord, Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez or Michael Harper. Wright has been awarded a MacArthur Fellowship and, in 2005, received the Bollingen Prize, which has gone to Ashbery, Creeley & Pound, but more typically is given to the likes of Louise Glück, Anthony Hecht, John Hollander, W.S. Merwin or Richard Wilbur, representing the spectrum of American poetry from A to B. But if Jay Wright the poet isn’t usual fare for Flood Editions, publishers of Ron Johnson, Robert Duncan, Graham Foust & William Fuller, Music’s Mask and Measure certainly is.
The volume consists of five sequences, entitled “Equation One” through “Five,” each consisting of a number of short, formally consistent poems. If you saw them on the page without reading them, your first impression might be that they were the work of Flood author John Taggart. Readers familiar with the expansive first-person poetics of Wright may be surprised to read, complete on a single page:
This ordinary language finds
rhythm in ambiguous flame,
that stable density of one
and one, the urgent displacement
that nurtures light.
Save for the fact that Robert Creeley would never deploy four adjectives within five lines – just drop them and this really feels like his work – the poem here, and throughout this sequence, seems to call to mind the entire line of the short poem from Zukofsky forward. I hear Taggart, for example, in the name of the flower here:
Fall unveils the acute
aconitum, blue
light against the garden’s
edge. You might hear
a greenish bird in flight.
Here too there is a word choice – greenish – I can’t imagine Taggart making, even as I wonder what bird that possibly might be, anything from a mallard to a feral parrot. Does it change the poem to know that aconitum is poisonous?
There’s not as much narrative distance from one page to the next as there would be with Zukofsky, Creeley or Taggart – you could reasonably print these equations as poems in a journal, running the eleven stanzas of the first, for instant, onto two or three pages. But that approach would surrender the sharp focus on each stanza as a work-in-itself:
Silence structures a fragile
world; the little day
passes; darkness descends.
The expansive touch of prayer
makes love a random walk.
If what Wright wanted to accomplish was to demonstrate that he could have been a completely different poet & still have been a superb one, this book proves the point again & again. Yet I doubt actually if Wright was much interested in that at all. The five “equations” do ultimately tell a kind of story & the form very much reflects the content.
So maybe it’s the publishers of Flood who deserve the credit here, since this book is going to bring Wright to an audience that maybe hasn’t paid him much heed in a long time – that Corinth Press volume, after all, was 36 years ago. Wright absolutely stands up to the requirements of a poetry very different from his best known works, and we’re fortunate that they’re aimed right at readers who are going to respond deeply to these seemingly simple texts.
Labels: Jay Wright
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
§
Poet Rahim al-Maliki
killed in Baghdad blast
§
Coming to Rushdie’s defense
in Pakistan…
but not in The West
The New York Times
speaks up
in Rushdie’s defense
sorta
§
Two readings by Joe Ceravolo
(MP3s)
§
Rediscovering
Egbert Martin
§
Janine Pommy Vega –
not a delicate creature
§
Jack Spicer
reading
Language
(MP3)
§
Faculty Status at
| Campus |
Full-Time Tenured |
Full-Time Tenure Track |
Full-Time Non-Tenure Track |
Part-Time |
| |
26 |
13 |
7 |
0 |
| |
0 |
0 |
18 |
5 |
| McGregor (distance education) |
0 |
0 |
27 |
57 |
| |
0 |
0 |
43 |
92 |
| |
0 |
0 |
7 |
57 |
| |
0 |
0 |
36 |
79 |
Guess which campus is closing?
§
JT Leroy
is busted
§
Why so many archives
go to Austin
§
Maxwell Corydon Wheat, Jr.
gets more attention
for having his
laureateship
nixed
§
Creeley & Stein’s translator
brings Scottish poetry
to
§
What the collapse
of AMS/PGW
means to the large
independent publishers
§
Two readings by
John Godfrey
(MP3s)
§
A new poetry column
in the News & Observer
of
tries to quiet down
all that
§
Philip Lopate
on
Lenny Michaels
§
§
Poets picking poets
(plus a book
from a working-class hero
who just happens
to be married
to Dorianne Laux)
§
A U.S. obit
for
Nazek Al Malaika
§
Jessica Fischer,
Yale Younger Poet
& the latest
protégé
of Milosz & Hass
§
Concluding
online publication
of a book
on Oromo poetry
§
Home of the Hoosier Poet
§
Poems about
”byres, beds, bogs and bicycles,
weather, townlands,
candlesticks
and a council pump”
§
The Gioia of reading
on CNN
§
One of the stranger ideas
on how to fund poetry
§
§
at 80
§
This poet is earning
an MD
§
David Harsent’s Selected Poems
dealt with
in under 200 words
§
“My place was always
left-center, a little to the rear”
§
Roberto Bolaño
as seen from the
§
§
Littlefoot:
a poem by Charles Wright
§
A prize for poetry
in Ireland
§
The
on Maxine Kumin
§
“True poetry is always noble and moral”
§
The letters of
A.E. Housman
§
Maja Ratkje
live in Paris
§
The ordinary
reader
§
Fighting to save
internet radio
§
Summer o’ Love
redux
§
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
At first, the poems of Chris Tonelli remind you of the off-beat wit associated with the
Night Terror
I had a dream that
the train seemed
important in passing,
something charged.
And I felt as if I was
easily going to have
sex w/ somebody
on that train. But, as
usual, it was someone
on the train before.
But then the humor gets more aggressive, or perhaps transgressive, and reminds me at least more of some of the aspects of Actualism – the 1970s movement begot by Ted Berrigan in Iowa that mostly moved later to the Bay Area before sputtering out – with which I was less fond:
Think Outside the Box
Think inside the butthole.
The last word of this one-line poem pivots the last word of its title, which is its “move” aesthetically. But it also limits it, drastically. So it makes me wonder.
This in turn is followed by a work that tries way too hard for its effect:
The Over-Zealous Philanthropist or The Bullshit Air on the Other Side of Forgiveness
In the silence
after the fart, he
makes sure that
everyone is ok.
Which makes me think the author must be very young indeed.¹ But then there’s something extraordinary:
At a Theater Urinal
The electric eye must have known the movie
was strange and wonderful because it flushed
while I was standing right there. It was true.
No one was watching anymore. It said: Go,
tumble like a manuscript over the lawn.
So that this short volume, {Wide Tree} – the brackets are part of the title – just out from Kitchen Press, rescues itself, tho not completely. Then I see this Cambridge poet dedicate a poem to Bill Knott, the crown prince of bad judgment wedded to an otherwise razor mind, and I begin to wonder if Chris Tonelli isn’t, or wasn’t once, one of Knott’s students. Tonelli’s own profile on Blogger lists a group of favorite books that includes these poets (and in this order):
Wallace Stevens
John Ashbery (Self-Portrait)
Ted Hughes
Elizabeth Bishop
A.R. Ammons
Fernando Pessoa
Nicanor Parra
Alan Dugan
Denis Johnson
Franz Wright
William Bronk
Bill Knott
August Kleinzahler
Anne Carson
Except for the Ashbery, not a
But it’s almost impossible for me to imagine the poet who could write “Think Outside the Box” reading & liking the inordinately grim, but ethically impeccable, Bronk. Or, for that matter, Franz Wright, whose poems are only funny in an Ed Wood sort of way, unintentionally. Ammons, Bishop & Dugan all strike me as among the very best SoQ poets of the past century – Dugan is especially under-appreciated. And he does use humor (usually of the gallows sort – Dugan might be the connecting point between some of these other poets & a writer like Bronk).
The most interesting of these choices, to my reading at least, is Ashbery, not only because Tonelli’s book virtually screams out its debt to Ted Berrigan & Ron Padgett & Dick Gallup & Darrell Gray (perhaps him most of all), all either NY School poets or, in Gray’s case, one heavily influenced thereby, albeit at one remove. It’s that Tonelli has chosen the very least “NY Schoolish” of all Ashbery’s books.
So here is my question, and it could apply to Knott as well as to Tonelli – why would a poet so thoroughly oriented toward a particular kind of poetry, specifically the
I’m not particularly saying that their approach is “wrong,” but I do find it baffling.
¹ His Blogger profile – not always the best source – says he’s 32.
Labels: Chris Tonelli
Monday, June 25, 2007
The use of names in jacket blurbs or, for that matter, as points of comparison anywhere is a process that needs to be handled with considerable delicacy if it is not to descend instantly into nonsense. In Dave Itzkoff piece on the new Library of America volume of Philip K. Dick novels in Sunday’s New York Times Book Review notes, Jonathan Lethem recently penned a piece on Dick that
tells us Dick is a bit like Dostoyevsky, a bit like Robert Altman, a bit like Bob Dylan.
The result, Itzkoff argues, is not unlike the famous scramble suit of Dick’s A Scanner Darkly,
all one sees is a shifting set of characteristics that add up to a vague blur.
But Lethem’s triangulation of the sci-fi master has the virtue of having at least put if not the “right,” at least reasonable¹ stakes in the ground. What happens when the names invoked are profoundly, even goofily, inappropriate?
This thought ran through my head as I gazed at the rear cover of Copper Canyon’s new volume poetry by Marvin Bell, Mars Being Red. The names invoked on the jacket are, in this order, Walt Whitman, T.S. Eliot & Allen Ginsberg. That is such a peculiar troika that it’s ultimately unfair to Bell, whose poetry may not be my favorite, but for whom one could certainly make an argument. Bell is, at least to my reading, a victim of his own book jacket at least to the degree that these names set up expectations on the part of unfamiliar or unsuspecting readers. There are lots of reasons one might want to read Bell, might want to read this book, would find this book utterly fascinating, but they have nothing whatsoever to do with Walt Whitman, T.S. Eliot or Allen Ginsberg, with the possible plausible exception that Ginsberg wrote passionately about the war in Vietnam & Bell here writes his most topical poetry ever, taking on Rumsfeld, Cheney & Bush. Yet one could say that Donald Justice, with whom Bell taught at the Iowa Writers Workshop early in his career, likewise wrote passionately about Vietnam, as did James Dickey & Robert Bly. The choice of Ginsberg in this context seems especially gratuitous.
And it’s not even the claim the jacket is making. The actual quote, from an unnamed author at Booklist reads as follows:
T.S. Eliot meets Allen Ginsberg . . . [Bell’s poetry] will fascinate those interested in seeing what language can sometimes do in the hands of an expert.
To suggest that Bell’s poetry is in any manner the aesthetic lovechild of Eliot & Ginsberg does a kind of violence to all three – and it reminds us that Booklist doesn’t get knowledgeable people to write about the books it covers – but it is Bell who is most deeply wronged here. Because it is what is unique about his poetry that seems to me to be exactly what is being paved over by such a crude analogy.
Eliot, after all, was the anointed one amongst large portions of the School of Quietude (SoQ) right at the moment when Bell emerged as a young poet & settled in at Iowa City for two solid generations before his recent retirement (he’s now teaching in the low-residency MFA program at Pacific University in Oregon). Eliot was the poet raised to canonic heights by the New Critics, the point on which the older Fugitives and the younger Brahmins around Robert Lowell in
Iowa City was a major node on the New Critical map because René Wellek taught there between 1939 & ’46, tho he was originally greeted with open hostility by the old guard literary historians. Robert Penn Warren taught there for a semester in 1941. When John Berryman, one of the Brahmins, taught in the Workshop, his students included W. D. Snodgrass, Donald Justice, Philip Levine, Robert Dana, Constance Urdang, Donald Finkel & Henri Coulette. And when Murray Krieger, who had studied with both Warren & Allen Tate & taught at Kenyon, was named M.F. Carpenter Chair in Literary Criticism at Iowa in 1963, it was the first named chair for that discipline in America.
Yet as that class list makes clear, the teacher does not predict the student. Robert Grenier was the student of Robert Lowell just as I am very much the student of Jack Gilbert. For all of the conscious inbreeding implicit in a program like the Iowa Writers Workshop picking alumni like Bell & Justice to lead it for the next generation, the Workshop was hardly the paradise of the old formalism & in fact functioned much more as a counterbalance to it within the broader spectrum of the School of Quietude.
This actually is what I think Booklist must be getting at with its inclusion of “Allen Ginsberg,” who was never anything but the antithesis of Quietude during his own lifetime. In fact, the Workshop proved much closer to the new free-verse aesthetic of “open,” “naked, or even “leaping” poetry that grew up around apostate SoQ institutions like the American Poetry Review & poets such as Phil Levine & Robert Bly. A much more appropriate name than Ginsberg here would have been Kenneth Rexroth, the god of the
How Rexroth, the one-time anarcho-surrealist who was published early on by Zukofsky among the Objectivists & later functioned as a grumpy uncle to the Beats & other New American poets in San Francisco, gets to be adopted by this side of the School of Quietude & becomes, in fact, an important resource, is a long story worth some investigation. An awful lot of cultural revisionism can be traced back to this phenomenon, which would have surprised Rexroth were he alive today almost as much as the new diversity & liveliness in present-day Iowa City might have surprised Ginsberg.
Within all of this movement within the SoQ, Bell has always been a middle figure, fully capable of writing formally & yet comfortable with most of the tenets of the so-called Open poetry. Further, Bell has never been one of the dapper bards in suits comfortable with corporate boards & the like. In this sense, he’s the antithesis of the likes of Edward Hirsch, Dana Gioia & Robert Pinsky.
But to characterize this as T.S. Eliot meets Allen Ginsberg is plausible only in a world in which the readers aren’t going to recognize any poets less famous than those two.
The Whitman reference is even slipperier. If one takes Whitman’s primary literary legacy to be a rejection of the tradition of European closed verse forms, a preference for indeterminacy & the rejection of closure, none of that is true of Bell, who fits 61 poems into 81 pages here, using 12-point type. But the claim that’s being made isn’t finally about Whitman the poet. Quoting (again without naming the actual author) Harvard Review, the jacket says, in its entirety,
Bell has the largest heart since Walt Whitman.
That sounds like a diagnosis of congestive heart disease, but is really not much more than a claim that Bell is an empathetic, caring guy, not the sort of thing you’d write about either Jack Spicer or Robert Frost or Ezra Pound, not in fact a statement about writing at all.
These are the only names actually mentioned on the jacket of Mars Being Red. None really has anything to do with Marvin Bell. It might have been far mor powerful to write, for example, that Marvin Bell’s students have included . . . and listed some of the more successful of those poets, a list at least as powerful (and considerably longer) than Berryman’s. Or to have discussed his own actual context and influences. The remainder of the back cover text does not do much more than indicate that these are Bell’s most overtly political poems.
My question is: does this serve the poet? I can’t imagine that it does.
I’ve written before that I think that that the
In contrast, look at how post-avant poets continue the work, say, of a Spicer or a Frank O’Hara. O’Hara may have been dead for 41 years, but he has a new book out, Poems from the Tibor de Nagy Editions. Spicer is demonstrably more famous now than when he died and is about to have multiple new volumes of his poetry & correspondence out.
You will find few contemporary poets, if any, actively trying on the writing style of an Amy Lowell the way they do Gertrude Stein, tho the two women were born in the same year. Similarly, SoQ modernists like Conrad Aiken, Archibald MacLeish & Edna St. Vincent Millay don’t engage contemporary poets in quite the same way as Pound, Williams or Zukofsky. Why not? It would be easy enough to argue that, well, the Whitman - Dickinson - Pound - Williams - Zukfosky - Olson - Grenier - Goldsmith line of writing survives because it’s objectively better or more powerful or more formally innovative, but it’s obvious also that SoQ poets don’t believe that. Why then do they let their own heritage vanish into the mists of time?
The result is something like what we see on the back of Marvin Bell’s book. Names are invoked, but not meaningfully. It’s no help to the poet and no help to the reader.
¹ I might have chosen Roger Corman in lieu of Bob Altman.
Labels: blurbs, Marvin Bell, School of Quietude
Sunday, June 24, 2007
A very nice review
of
The Age of Huts
Obviously I owe
Andrew Ervin,
of whom I’d not heard before,
some serious thanks!
Labels: Personal
Saturday, June 23, 2007
Juan Ramón Jiménez:
sex with the nuns
§
Poetry from Guantanamo
(video,
may require subscription
to the Wall Street Journal)
An article about the book
in which these poems appear
§
37 years in exile,
Iraqi poet
Nazek Al Malaika
dies in Cairo
§
Juliana Spahr’s
The Transformation
§
You do the math:
parataxis
in John Ashbery & Lyn Hejinian
§
§
Rescuing Canadian neglectorinos
§
Interviewing Charles Bernstein
from
§
§
Chris Stroffolino,
”pro-Beatnik”
§
Why is Rushdie a knight?
Nominating committee
proves clueless
§
JT Leroy
appears
at his/her trial
§
Librarian fending off
the attack of
the Blog People
§
§
§
§
Implications
of the decline
in newspaper critics
§
According to HFN,
the Home Furnishing News
trade mag,
Barnes & Noble is testing
furniture sales
§
§
§
A Fringe Fest
for London’s Book Expo
§
The Great British Novel:
a contradiction in terms?
§
Flannery O’Connor,
Betty Hester
(& Brad Gooch!)
§
Seeking the 19th century
for expats in Osaka
The real (19th century) deal
in Boston
§
One free book
for each 11-year-old
in the country
(now about their parents…)
§
Aiming to spoil
Harry Potter
§
§
Gioia at Stanford:
art before celebrity
§
The cult of the amateur 2.0
§
§
Stephen Vincent’s
brief career
as an installation
§
Art student
strikes gold
§
Like Bambi
in a bloodbath
§
& who
wishes they weren’t
The NY Times
takes it more seriously
§
Peter Schjeldahl
on the
Venice Biennale
§
Seeing red
on
§
Form failing function
puts modernist architecture
at risk
§
People in glass houses
dot dot dot
§
The naked museum
§
Learning to really hate
John Zorn
Friday, June 22, 2007
The first time I ever read an excerpt from Ketjak publicly, at a restaurant on Berkeley’s Telegraph Avenue, either very late in 1974 or possibly early ’75, my co-reader was (or was to have been) Kathy Acker. I say “was to have been” since instead of showing up herself, Kathy sent three surrogates whom she had instructed to talk about what she was like as a lover. Peter Gordon, whom I believe may then have been Kathy’s husband (a distinction both seemed to take very lightly), was one speaker. Composer (and later a longtime researcher at the famed Xerox PARC think tank in Palo Alto, a job he segued into having been a successful programmer of music for early generation video games) Rich Gold was the second. I forget just who the third was, tho it may have been either Clay Fear (pianist Christopher Berg) or possibly Phil Harmonic or even Blue Gene Tyranny, other composers from the electronic music scene around Mills College. In fact, they never discussed what Acker was like as a lover, certainly not in the usual sense of depicting her as a sexual partner. Rather, the trio talked instead about what it might be that would have caused Acker to think (a) to do this, what the role of gossip or possibly gossip plus sex might be in the art scene, and (b) why she would think that her lovers in particular could sit down side by side & have a reasonable conversation on this topic in public. It was a utopian moment, albeit one delivered with some puzzlement & bemusement. It was apparent that all three cared about Kathy much more deeply than I think she ever would have acknowledged.
I had thought that my new poem – I was reading Ketjak out of the green notebook in which the early portion of the text was composed – was going to sound quite revolutionary, all this reiteration & weaving together of different themes. But in fact I’d been trumped by Kathy’s marvelous sense of self-mythologization & theater. Years later, I once heard a poet who’d been there recount almost verbatim the discussion between the three panelists. Who else had been on that bill, I asked. He couldn’t remember.
Last Sunday, I found myself in a not completely dissimilar situation at the Zinc Bar in
Smith began her reading by distributing a dozen or so copies of OFC to the audience, roughly one for every three people there. She then announced that she was going to read the text on page 43, and proceeded to read it. Silently.
This is, I think, an impulse every writer who has ever given a reading must have felt somewhere along the line. But never before have I actually seen someone act upon that impulse. As a move in a reading, it’s brash, “right,” obvious & “juvenile” all at once. It’s the complexity of all those different aspects working in unison (or at cross purposes) that probably stops each of us from proceeding to act on this impulse. Smith’s gift is that she acts where others demure.
Smith followed this by reading, really reading aloud, most tho not all of Exile, the first of three works that make up the Topology half of Organic Furniture Cellar. In some fashion not entirely evident to me, Exile is a read-through of James Joyce’s Ulysses (this reading occurring on the day after Bloomsday). Hearing her proceed through these poems made me conscious of the degree of organization in OFC: one half, or movement, dedicated to time, Chronology, the other to space, Topology, each composed of three suites, at least one of which perceptibly deals with the dimension of the other half of the book.
Smith is, I’ve decided, a formalist who thinks deeply about large structures. In this sense, her work does resemble the writing of Steve McCaffery (whom she acknowledges in the surprisingly straightforward ten-page introduction to OFC, a manifesto calling for a “plastic” poetics) as well as certain works by such dissimilar writers as Barrett Watten & Jack Spicer. OFC is a closed poem in rather the same way that a sestina is closed, or perhaps a better analogy might be The Odyssey. Even as each page looks like a testament to the ludic, its very existence depends upon the whole.
In her critical writing – Smith’s acknowledgement’s page is every bit as detailed & serious as the book’s introduction – she is very clear that these “works on paper” (OFC’s actual subtitle) are not to be thought of as spoken & that she wants to challenge the lazier habits of reading as well:
With plastic poetry, I want to change the reading space in such a way that the one who reads is forced to make amends for new structures in his or her virtual path. The words on a page must be plastic in virtual space as architecture and sculpture are plastic in real space.
One way to mark this in a reading obviously is to disrupt the readerliness of the event over & over, by reading a text silently or by saying, as Smith did of The Wandering Rocks section of Exile,
I really like this poem. I read it all the time in my head, but I’m not going to read it right now.
Having read the opening suite of Topology – Smith’s source of Ulysses being something of an icon of the geographically centered text¹ – she turned to Canal Series, the first suite of Chronography, OFC’s opening section, which might be said to document Smith’s move – more than just physical – from her home state of Alabama to Buffalo, New York. She described the suite as her “cultural shock” poetry.
The only passage of Smith’s reading that did not come from the opening suites of OFC’s two sections proved to be the one she read silently, the “Nightwalks” poem of Shifting Landscapes (the third of Chronography’s suites). It’s a poem that in part articulates the experience of driving as well as a need to demarcate the distinction between “inside the circle” & “outside the circle.” Given that Smith had just driven for eight hours from Richmond, Virginia, for this reading – the drive should have taken six, but the usual Sunday I-95 coagulation was made that much worse by Father’s Day traffic heading home -- and that Smith arrived with something like ten minutes to spare before she went on, the interregnum created by the silent reading proved not unlike a moment’s meditation, creating the spacing in which a reading could proceed. Not that Smith doesn’t have, as she has announced both on her blog & at the Zinc Bar, “problems with reading.”
I gave my reading, pleased to see all the folks in the audience, to see among them Kit Robinson (in town for a family event), Ted Greenwald & Charles Bernstein, as well as younger poets such as Brenda Iijima & Douglas Rothschild, & younger poets still, such as Adam Golaski & Eric Gelsinger (neither of whom I’d met before). I reminded myself that Smith is really part of this last cohort, and that in fact I wrote Ketjak five years before she was born. That is a humbling situation.
The instant I was done, Smith hopped back up, announcing that “I want to read some more,” in response to what I’d just read. She then proceeded to read The Sirens section of Exile, which does indeed echo the self-same chapter of Ulysses, bronze by gold, albeit in Smith’s version the capital letter isn’t the b as it is for Joyce, but rather the n since its spelling out a mid-word acrostic that reads vertically NEON LIT CHURCHES. Keeping her reading persona intact, one part Kathy Acker, one part Scarlett O’Hara, as well as her poetics (upper limit Cage, lower limit the performance-centered wit of a Steve McCaffery), Smith commented “I like poetry as litigation.” Indeed.
¹ All those Dublin tourists following their maps of Ulysses from station to station.
Labels: Jessica Smith, Kathy Acker, Readings
Thursday, June 21, 2007
Recently Received
Books (Poetry)
Kostas Anagnopoulos, Irritant, Ugly Duckling Presse,
Stan Apps, Info Ration, Make Now Press,
John Ashbery, A Worldly Country,
Ed Barrett, Kevin White, Pressed Wafer,
Ellen Baxt, Analfabeto / An Alphabet, Shearsman,
Marvin Bell, Mars Being Red, Copper Canyon Press, Port
Erin Elizabeth Burke, Run Down the Emphasis, Kitchen Press,
Clint Burnham, Rental Van, Anvil Press,
Inger Christensen, It, translated by Susanna Nied, New Directions,
Norman Finkelstein, Passing Over, Marsh Hawk Press, East Rockaway, NY, 2007
Elisa Gabbert, Thanks for Sending the Engine, Kitchen Press,
Kenneth Goldsmith, Traffic, Make Now Press,
Kate Greenstreet, Rushes, Above/Ground Press,
Cathy Park Hong, Dance Dance Revolution, W.W.
Justin Marks, You Being You By Proxy, Kitchen Press,
Jennifer Moxley, The L:ine, Post-Apollo Press,
Frank Parker, Heart Shaped Blossoms, self-published,
Matt Rasmussen, Fingergun, Kitchen Press,
Stuart Ross, I Cut My Finger, Anvil Press,
Emma Rossi, Becoming, Green Zone,
Ara Shirinyan, Syria Is In The World, Palm Press,
Chris Tonelli, (Wide Tree), Kitchen Press,
Amish Trivedi, The Naked Rain, no publisher listed,
Jay Wright, Music’s Mask and Measure, Flood Editions, Chicago, 2007
Books (other)
Gordon Ball, Dark Music, Cityful Press, Longmont, CO, 2006
Morton Hurley (editor), The Anthology of Spam Poetry: The First Hour, Vértice 1925,
David Markson, The Last Novel, Shoemaker Hoard,
Cormac McCarthy, The Road, Vintage Books,
Freckerick Smock, Pax Intrantibus: A Meditation on the Poetry of Thomas Merton, Broadstone Books,
Christa Wolf, One Day A Year: 1960-2000, translated by Lowell Bangerter, Europa Editions,
Journals
Oh One Arrow, flim forum press.
Open Letter, Thirteenth Series, Number 2, Spring 2007, Into the Looking-Glass Labyrinth: Myths & Mystery in Canadian Literature,
Works all received after June 12th
Labels: Recently Received
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
Coming to the Bowery Poetry Club
Saturday, June 23
(also, Boston, Cambridge, Danbury,
Nyack
& back in NYC
over the next ten days),
the great folk ensemble
of Tuva,
Alash
I heard them jamming on Monday
with members of
the Sun Ra Arkestra,
& it was,
to quote
”mind blowing”
§
§
Harryette Mullen
will be judging
the 2008 Kore Press
First Book Award
§
Extensive documents from
Cambridge Experimental Women’s
Poetry Festival
§
Hannah Weiner
reading from
Spoke
(MP3)
§
§
The Wind Shifts:
The New Latino Poetry
§
Ted Berrigan
interviewed by
Lyn Hejinian & Kit Robinson
(MP3)
§
Nigerian performance poetry
in
§
Bringing Ketjak
to
§
PENNsound’s
Jack Spicer page
has added a reading of
The Holy Grail
§
Poetry “on the road”
in Tel Aviv
§
All of Ulysses
on MP3s
(total running time
32 hours
39 minutes
1 second)
§
On Rushdie’s knighthood,
Iran is not amused
& Pakistan’s not too happy either
§
“Our national philosopher”
Todd Gitlin on Richard Rorty
§
Tales
from the Futurists’
Woodstock
§
Suing
JT Leroy
§
My vocabulary,
my self
§
§
Spatial cognition
& its expression
in language & gesture
§
§
Michael Hamburger
has died
§
The discontent
of
o’er the nixing
of its laureate
§
A national gathering
of
poets laureate
§
Talking with
the Poet Laureate
of Indiana
§
On the pantoume
§
§
§
The journalist as poet:
Eliza Griswold
§
The poet as commencement speaker:
Dana Gioia
§
A profile of
Charles Guenther,
the
& critic,
who in 1958
was one of the first
to celebrate Howl
§
A last reading
for a dying poet
§
Homophonic translations
from the Chinese
§
A profile of
Diesel Books
§
bookstore
rescued
§
You want your books
displayed?
§
§
Toward a political sociology
of Oromo literature
§
Military women:
a call to submit
§
Remembering
Mayadhar Mansingh
§
§
A Tess Gallagher book
appears in the
§
Praying
to an absent God
§
New poems
by Annie Freud
§
Celebrating the life of Ted Hughes
§
Rescuing MoMA,
rescuing sculpture
§
§
Compiling
The Big Red Songbook
§
§
Changing history, changing names
§
§
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
The most exciting and satisfying anthology I’ve acquired in the past month is The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century, edited by William Allegrezza & Raymond Bianchi and published by their own Cracked Slab Books. It’s by no means a perfect anthology – indeed, it makes some of the same basic mistakes that I excoriated the editors of Saints of Hysteria over – no index of contributors (which, frankly, even an acknowledgements page or bionotes section can accomplish), no visible theory of organization, some questionable calls concerning the book’s scope, even mixing in poetic statements with the poetry. Yet whereas Saints very quickly collapses under the aggregate weight of bad decisions, City Visible just sails on through. It not only is easily the best anthology I’ve ever seen that tried to capture the lively scene of the Second City, but it’s a worthy companion to Stephanie Young’s Bay Poetics, which for my money is the gold standard in contemporary poetry anthologies, especially ones that offer a regional focus.¹ Why does City Visible succeed where Hysteria simply proves to be too-well named?
The answer is generosity. Where one is painfully aware that the editors of Hysteria are constantly shuffling the deck in order to keep the reader from figuring out just how few cards they’re playing with, City Visible, which – for its project – is positively anorectic at 250 pages (half the size of Bay Poetics), repeatedly errs on the side of inclusion. Its 52 poets offer a very broad definition of what is
At just under five pages per poet, it turns out to be a better presentation overall than the 30 pages accorded each of 13 participants in the Rankine & Sewell volume with its far broader scope precisely because City Visible offers so much more context. What jumps immediately at me is how very important the line is for so many of these poets, whether it’s the very long line of Jennifer Scappetone, the lush rhetorical line of Peter O’Leary, the variable stanzas & gaps in lines of Ed Roberson, Szymaszek’s sense of the Olsonian, even William Fuller’s hyper-precise prose poems, or, to pick a very different example, this:
I will fuck you up.
Come back here motherfucker.
You ‘bout to get served.
This poem by Luis Urrea is, among its other virtues, a perfect haiku. Urrea’s fabulous ear for the vernacular is almost enough to make me love this form for the first time in decades.
What’s interesting about this, for me at least, is that the great knock against
The City Visible does one thing that I generally don’t care for in anthologies, but which works here to give this book far more of a sense of order than, say, Hysteria: it uses photographs of the poets at the beginning of each selection. It’s not so much the quality of the photo – some, like Juliana Spahr’s snapshot of Jennifer Scappettone, don’t reproduce well at all in a thumbnail size on the matte finish of your standard trade book paper – as it is the instant visual separation of one poet from the next. In a way, these miniature photos accomplish much of what a gray page separating out each contributor would have done, but without adding 50-plus pages to the project. This is especially important since Allegrezza & Bianchi seem determined to make use of almost every inch of white space imaginable. When a contributor doesn’t use the three-quarters of a page given over to poetic statements – Michael O’Leary’s piece is one sentence long – the glare of unused paper is startling.
There are a lot of poets here who are reasonably well known far beyond the West Coast of Lake Michigan – Eric Elshtain, Peter & Michael O’Leary, William Fuller, Ed Roberson, Arielle Greenberg, Shin Yu Pai, Dan Beachy-Quick, Maxine Chernoff, Paul Hoover, Tim Yu, Laura Sims, Roberto Harrison, Stacy Szymaszek – as well as poets who were completely new to me, including Srikanth Reddy, Suzanne Buffam, Erica Berheim, Garin Cychol, Kristy Odelius, Simone Muench, Lea Graham, Michelle Taransky, Cecilia Pinto, Johanny Paz, Ela Kotowska, Jennifer Karmin. And a bunch in between, such as John Tipton or Mark Tardi, whose poetry is some of my favorite in this volume. Tipton & Tardi are two poets I’ve been following for some time now, but it’s not clear to me that they’re nearly as widely known as they’re going to be in, say, another five years. This book should actually help in that process.
What I wasn’t able to figure out, tho, is why this order of poets and not some other. It’s not alphabetical, nor by date of birth, two fairly traditional strategies for organizing collections like this. It doesn’t start off with Paul Hoover & Maxine Chernoff, tho it is very clear that if this scene has parental figures in the way Olson functioned as one for
What I wish, in a way, is that Bianchi & Allegrezza had done for City Visible – beyond, say, just having more pages to work with, or a title that was more accurate, such as From Chicago Out (which would capture the role the city really has in this volume) – is to organize the contents more akin to the way Don Allen gathered his 44 poets in 1960 into five suites. Even if they had, say, gathered the departed into one group, perhaps Wisconsin poets into a second, Iowa into a third, and then divided the true current Chicagoans into one set of poets more aligned with formal poetry institutions, and a second grouping of those whose day jobs are not thus institutionalized around writing, it would have made for a more powerful reading. That’s an opportunity that Stephanie Young missed as well in Bay Poetics but I think I would argue that that minute you go beyond some minimum number of contributors – say thirty – some kind of ordering device or strategy is utterly necessary. The order here is not only NOT better than alphabetical, it’s not as effective as an alphabetical because there’s no perceptible rationale.
Similarly, I wish the editors had taken maybe ten more pages to discuss their process, their inclusions & exclusions, their theory of the order and anything which might be useful to contextualize the project further. (Did any poets refuse to participate, for example, the way
In all, this is an exciting, eye opening & absolutely useful volume. Its faults, like those of the Allen anthology, have more to do with the limits of human beings and economics & how this book got here in this form than they do with anything that might be “wrong” with the result. One question I would be fascinated to have answered, for example, is whether the editors approached any larger press – the
¹ In addition to Bay Poetics and the numerous anthologies of the
² The risk in this approach, it seems to me, is that it so broadens your possible roster of contributors that it quickly becomes almost meaningless. For example, David Melnick & Tom Mandel both attended the University of Chicago, Andrew Levy taught at the Illinois Institute of Technology for years, Tina Darragh & P. Inman went to library school in Illinois, Jim Liddy’s been practicing a poetics that is one part Jack Spicer, one part Paddy Kavanagh in Milwaukee for decades, Morgan Gibson was once the archetypal Milwaukee poet. Indiana (Eshleman, Hirschman, Fredman) & Michigan (Eshleman again, Wakoski, Watten, Harryman, George & Chris Tysh, Notambu, Pearson when he was there, even John Latta in Ann Arbor) all get left out of this mental map. I’m not suggesting, actually, that any of these poets need to be here – certainly not the way I would argue for Deanovich, Gartung or Sloan – but that the book’s methodology opens the door to such questions.
³ And just as invariably not mentioning Gwendolyn Brooks or, to employ this expanded geographic model, Lorine Niedecker.
Labels: anthologies
Sunday, June 17, 2007
Saturday, June 16, 2007
A guide to
Chinua Achebe
Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie
on Achebe
§
§
Talking with
”Downriver Dan”
Featherston
§
Pol tries to explain
his support for
the
§
Is poetry “the news”?
the Poethics
of the Found Text
§
§
Finally…
those Boots of Spanish Leather
§
§
Writers who rock,
rockers who write
§
Ti Jean’s scroll
goes home to Lowell
On the Road
as your summer travel guide
§
§
American Poets in the 21st Century:
another POV
§
§
Pierre Joris
responds to my footnote
re Poems for the Millennium
Vol 2
§
Why the Pirahã
don’t have numbers
§
The joy
of used books
§
Celebrating the 100th birthday of
Antonio Delfini
by awarding
a lifetime achievement prize
to Tom Raworth
§
“a poet as much as
(or even more than)
…a novelist”
§
DieKu
is tombstone haiku
§
Another nice obit
for
Richard Rorty
Rorty’s last interview
is in the new Progressive
§
Three women poets
of the
Harlem Renaissance
§
Lee Nagrin’s
last laugh
§
A conference on
the history of
Tamil poetry
§
Beowulf
the comic
§
§
A podcast series
of Filipino poetry
§
Celebrating the bicentennial
of John Greenleaf Whittier
§
“At night Chinamen jump”
&
what really happens
§
Robert Penn
fighting the Enlightenment
§
Talking with
Marilyn Shelton
§
Reading Akhmatova
in Tehran
§
Translation wins
”best novel in English”
award
§
A perfect prescription
for bad poetry:
”larger themes
with lyric intensity”
§
A changing of the guard
in Pleasanton
§
Talking with
Tony Hoagland
§
A Calder breeds dragons
in the DC ‘burbs
§
The street sculptures
of Mark Jenkins
mostly are made of
Scotch Tape
§
This list of
the 5 most beautiful
museums in America
(exteriors only)
includes a former
box factory
§
Labels: links
Friday, June 15, 2007
Sunday
in
New York City
at
the Zinc Bar,
90 W. Houston,
corner of LaGuardia Place,
212-477-8337
7:00 PM
Jessica Smith & Ron Silliman
Labels: Readings
Thursday, June 14, 2007
In 1965, one of the most interesting and innovative anthologies of American poetry ever published appeared as, of all things, a Doubleday Anchor Original, your basic mass market paperback. A Controversy of Poets, co-edited by Paris Leary and Robert Kelly, contained the writing of 59 then-active American poets, roughly half of them members of the School of Quietude (SoQ) (tho they didn’t call it that at the time), the rest participants in the New American Poetry (NAP). The 60th poet was supposed to have been Robert Duncan, the one writer actually selected by both editors, but he refused to appear in the same pages as members of the SoQ, since he felt their work demeaned the craft of poetry.
The selections were presented in alphabetical order, a sequence that clearly favored the New Americans, beginning as they did with Ashbery, Blackburn & Blaser. Kelly also expanded his definition of the NAP beyond the range used by Donald Allen in his anthology, including poets who had come to the fore in the five years between books, such as Jackson Mac Low, Thomas Merton, Joel Oppenheimer, Rochelle Owens, Gerrit Lansing and Theodore Enslin, as well as reaching back for one poet who was just then returning literally from oblivion, Louis Zukofsky. Zukofsky gave Kelly the last word in the book as well.
In the 42 years since, some of the SoQ poets, such as Leary himself, Gray Burr, Ralph Pomeroy, John Woods & Melvin Walker La Follette have disappeared almost entirely from view, while others (including James Dickey and Donald Finkel) really have acquired the status of neglectorinos, good, even important writers who have undeservedly been forgotten. Rich kid formalist Frederick Seidel, long before he’d become known principally as a collector of expensive motorcycles, turns up writing such breathless verse as “My slippers / Exhale lamé.” “
On the New American side, only Georgia Lee McElhaney disappeared from sight, abandoning poetry for politics for many years before re-emerging fairly recently in Shepherdstown, West Virginia where she runs the Bookend Poets writing group.
Long before Gerald Graff began to chant “teach the conflicts,” Kelly & Leary were content to put up their favorite poets side by side & let people see what the differences might be directly. It made for passionate reading. And it didn’t hurt that at that time, this was the only readily available source of work by either Mac Low or Zukofsky, or for that matter any of Jack Spicer’s mature poetry or Frank O’Hara’s “Biotherm,” printed in what looks like 8-point type, but may even be 7. This was – still is – an exciting book.
What brings A Controversy of Poets to mind is a volume that seems to share some of the same adventurous spirit, American Poets in the 21st Century: The New Poetics, edited by Claudia Rankine & Lisa Sewell. This book is 30 percent shorter than Controversy, 400 pages to its 570, and its poets far fewer – 13 instead of 59 – but what one sees here is the clash of aesthetics between the two American literary traditions, with Mark Levine, D.A. Powell & Karen Volkman at one extreme, Kenny Goldsmith at the other.
But where Controversy really sets up a dividing line and speaks openly of the differences, this volume just as consciously tries to move beyond the Either / Or phenomenon that has dominated American verse since at least the 1840s, presenting its authors instead as
particular but representative shadings along the continuum of contemporary poetry
My own sense is that the spectrum model is ahistorical although it may represent a desire among younger contemporary readers who may well have been brought up in college reading both traditions & just maybe think that this ongoing dispute is a tad stupid. On the other hand, I wouldn’t be shocked to discover that some SoQ readers think Lisa Sewell got snookered into fronting for a bunch of barbarians, since the move from one end to the other gets pretty post-avant very fast. In fact, it’s worth noting who is here & in what order:
Mark Levine
Karen Volkman
D.A. Powell
Peter Gizzi
Juliana Spahr
Joshua Clover
Kevin Young
Tracie Morris
Myung Mi Kim
Stacy
Susan Wheeler
Mark Nowak
Kenneth Goldsmith
Perhaps a strict version of the spectrum would be a little different – I’d probably put Kevin Young fourth, for example, and would have had Levine third – but it’s obvious that a lot of thought has gone into the context of each poet. Each poet is also given roughly 30 pages – indeed, the individual page counts are remarkably even, there’s nobody here positioned here the way Charles Olson was in The New American Poetry, taking up 10 percent of the main texts (out of 44 poets) & 20 percent of the critical material. There is poetry, an essay about the poet, a poetic statement, plus a CD in which each of the 13 appear (in the same order as the text). This is a model that Rankine and Spahr followed in their earlier American Women Poets in the 21st Century, also from Wesleyan, although that volume divided up 420 pages among just ten contributors and had no CD. As a presentation, this is impeccable. Contrasted with the jumble that is Saints of Hysteria – Powell and Wheeler are in both books – this is a powerful, intelligent production that makes me happy just to have it, even if – or even as – I don’t agree with all of its choices.
For choice, I think, is one of the book’s two serious questions. If you had to reduce all of contemporary American poetry to just 13 individuals, even narrowing the list some with that “21st Century” frame (weeding out, presumably, us old farts who made our bones way back when) whom would you choose? Three or four of the names on the list here seem plausible to me, but I have a hard time – no, impossible, I find it impossible – envisioning a list that small that does not have Linh Dinh on it. And I will admit that I think that the obvious stars among the younger “mainstream” poets have to include Alice Jones & Daisy Fried. I would have much sooner selected co-editor Lisa Sewell for one of the SoQ slots in this book than the folks she & Rankine chose.
But I think every reader is going to feel likewise, tho the names that may come up for them will differ. The minute I start thinking of who else I might select, I very quickly go way beyond 13 possibilities – I can get to over 100 in less than ten minutes without even thinking hard. There is a real issue here in presenting contemporary American poetry in so very few slices. You can’t even represent each major literary tendency and/or community with so few choices. Let alone make some kind of presentation of “representative shadings along the continuum.”
This is where the other problem, which is representing a phenomenon that is never just about who’s the better poet, but also carries within itself all of the social history of American writing, including the 160-year-old conflict between the School of Quietude & a broader, more experimental tradition – once they were called the Knickerbockers & Young Americans – in any kind of intelligible & useful form. A Controversy of Poets did a better job here for two reasons: it included more poets, which enabled both sides to show much greater diversity, and it didn’t superimpose what I suspect is a false model – “a continuum” – over something that is more complex.
Remember, when the New Americans were just getting started in the late 1940s, America was a nation of 150 million people, with an annual total of 8,000 book titles per year of all types and something under 200 publishing poets who were active enough to generate books. Today, the
That is the origin of all “the culture is failing” predictions from one group of people who want, above all else, a predictable mass that they can control critically, using the same old tools & devices as were used in 1950 or for that matter 1850. And it explains also why there should be so many more poets now even as poetry itself seems less and less of a “popular” activity. How an individual poet constructs an audience, let alone a career, is fundamentally different today.
This is what Rankine & Sewell are up against. Frankly there is no way to do this with just 13 poets. I would be totally impressed by an effort that tried to do so with 130 if it were half as intelligently put together as this volume. So I think the editors here have given themselves an impossible challenge. But what they have given us is something very good indeed. These are not necessarily the 13 poets you might want to enshrine, but if you find that you have a serious interest in any one of them, then American Poets in the 21st Century really is an indispensable book.
Labels: anthologies
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
Merwin or McKuen,
you decide
And even more
(I always thought
Rod was better
than that)
§
Ousmane Sembène,
the great African filmmaker
& novelist,
has died
§
§
§
Outsourcing journalism:
the next fun fad?
§
Why arts coverage
in daily papers
matters
§
Nicholas Kristof’s
Iraq Poetry Contest
§
Sheila E. Murphy
interviewing
Peter Ganick
§
§
More on the laureate’s revolt
of
§
Children’s laureate’s
radical idea –
books!
§
§
§
This year’s
Pew Fellows
§
§
Greg Djanikian’s
latest book
The “Armenian Reznikoff”
is that rarest of creatures,
a poet who went to my high school
§
Things fall apart,
but the Booker Prize
goes to
Chinua Achebe
§
§
§
“Our state's libraries'
greatest patron
since Andrew Carnegie.”
§
§
Andrew Keen
wants to be the next
Hilton Kramer
but it won’t work
§
Lit bloggers
are generally pissed-off
(What is it Sartre says
about the political value
of resentment?)
§
§
Maria Mazziotti Gillan.
executive director
of the
at
§
Evicting small presses
from Richard Hugo House
§
The AA Independent Press Guide
(AA in this instance
refers to
Acid Angel)
§
Talking with
Farideh Hassanzadeh
§
Poetry &/or patriotism
in Iran
§
Concerning Martin Amis’
declaration
that poetry is in decline
(maybe he means
his kind of poetry)
§
§
§
Discovering a new poet,
Wallace Stevens
§
§
When bad things
happen to good people,
the Bureau of Prisons
bans books
§
The Rupert Brooke market
deflates
§
§
Reviving Leonard Michaels
(one of the great
writers of short fiction)
§
Billy Collins’
editor
departs
§
§
§
Truth, advertising,
art poop
§
Dishing it out
but not taking it
§
Monument
to
Sol Lewitt
§
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
A great idea badly executed can be much worse than a bad idea.
My evidence for this assertion is Michael Benedikt’s anthology, The Prose Poem: An International Anthology, published as a mass market paperback, a Laurel Original, in 1976. When I first saw the little blue book, I bought it instantly, thinking At last! But when I got to the French section and saw that there was no Victor Segalen, no St.-John Perse, no Marcelin Pleynet, no Jacques Roubaud, my heart sank. Then I got, not quite at the very end, to the American section, which includes only the following:
Kenneth Patchen
Karl Shapiro
David Ignatow
Robert Bly
James Wright
W.S. Merwin
Anne Sexton
Russell Edson
Michael Benedikt
Jack Anderson
James Tate
No Gertrude Stein, no William Carlos Williams, no Robert Duncan, no Robert Creeley, no John Ashbery, no Ron Padgett, not one of the language poets. It was a debacle, a book that appeared to have been edited in the worst of faith, a deliberate falsification of the record. The British selection, containing only Peter Redgrove & Cecil Helman, was, if anything, worse. I felt nauseated & furious all at once. I realized two things almost instantly. One was that this volume, issued in a mass market trade format, was going to crowd out the marketplace for a truly comprehensive volume. The second was that a book this self-consciously false wasn’t going to do all that well. It would seem I was right on both counts. The Prose Poem appears never to have been reprinted – you can’t even find used copies on AddAll or BooksPrice, perhaps because the trade format used such cheap materials that even my own copy has to be held together now with a rubber band, its pages so acidic they’re almost smoldering their way to the illegible.
And to this date, there has never been a comprehensive anthology of the form. This one little terrible book both crowded out & poisoned the market.
Later, I did meet Michael Benedikt once and he wasn’t the cynical sharpie I’d envisioned from this project at all. If anything, he seemed a well-intentioned if somewhat bumbling sort of guy. I wondered later just how much of the disaster that was The Prose Poem was literally his lack of knowledge of the materials. Could he really not have known about Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, John Ashbery’s Three Poems, William Carlos Williams’ Kora in Hell, or Robert Creeley’s Presences? Or did he just lack the intellectual courage to step outside the confines of Robert Bly’s infinitesimal notion of what constituted a prose poem? Was he an active agent of the
I’d forgotten that whole deep sick-to-my-stomach feeling of a book that should be a great event but turns out just to be a mess until I acquired Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry, co-edited by Denise Duhamel, Maureen Seaton & David Trinidad, just released by Soft Skull Press. It’s a disaster, not on the scale of The Prose Poem, but a disaster nonetheless. If The Prose Poem warrants an F, Saints of Hysteria is more of a D+ affair. It’s not a malevolent book, but more in the tradition of Doug Messerli’s Language Poetries or Eliot Weinberger’s American Poetry Since 1950: Innovators and Outsiders, or, for that matter, Donald Allen’s attempt to “update” The New American Poetry, The Postmoderns, all of them examples of how you can make a bad book using only good poetry. That, for the most part, is the story here too.
Called by its publisher “first definitive collection of American collaborative poetry,” it’s anything but definitive. This volume is functionally incompetent as a historical record of the genre, and tho that may be the greatest of its sins, it’s not its biggest problem as a book. The three editors missed large swaths of collaborative work, yes, particularly among the language poets, the Actualists and among contemporary writers, but the volume’s largest hurdle – the one that makes it essentially unreadable as a book and unusable as a classroom text – is that it’s presented incoherently. With over 200 poets spread out over less than 400 pages, there is no index of authors anywhere save for an alphabetical list that mercifully takes up the rear cover. Presenting the material in what the editors claim is a “loose chronological order,” they’ve dated absolutely nothing. Allen Ginsberg turns up on page 3 alongside Neal Cassady & Jack Kerouac, then not again until page 59 when he collaborates with Kenneth Koch, then on page 75 with Ron Padgett, then on page 102 when he and Bob Rosenthal are working with an entire MFA class from Brooklyn College, then literally on the next page where he turns up with Lita Hornick & Peter Orlovsky. Hornick turns up again on the next page collaborating with Ron Padgett – it’s his first appearance since the Ginsberg collab & fourth in the book overall. An author’s index and end notes after each text listing any other pages each author appears on would have gone a long way toward making this book usable, but its present format renders it unintelligible. There are some interesting combinations here, but you’re on your own trying to find them. The occasional “process notes” serve to clutter, rather than clarify, what is already a mess. They should have been given their own separate section.
That overstatement from the book’s publisher that I quoted above continues, as follows: “ranging through the
Contemporary flarfists will I think have an almost identical complaint, tho with some different names (the token inclusion is Rod Smith). All forms of conceptual poetics are missing, such as the work Hannah Weiner did with John Perrault. Save for Keith Abbott & Pat Nolan, the Actualists – another Berrigan-inflected literary community of the 1970s – is completely absent. No Darrell Gray, no G. P. Skratz, no Dave Morice. It’s bizarre. No sign of Michael Lally anywhere. Is it really true that neither Jena Osman or Juliana Spahr have ever written collaborations? Sheila E. Murphy or Miekal And? Susan Schultz or Maria Damon? If they have, you can’t find out about it here. The editors have been careful enough to include smatterings of Robert Bly, Marilyn Hacker, Jim Harrison, Jane Miller, Reginald Shepherd, but it’s tokenism and easily identifiable as such. The result is that an unfamiliar or uneducated reader will come away from this book confirmed in the belief that the history of collaboration can be read as radiating outward from the writing of the three primary poets who dominate this volume and presumably the last half century of American poetry: Ted Berrigan, Joanna Fuhrman and David Lehman. That certainly is an interesting & curious history. I’m only buying one third of it.
So far as I can tell the title of this book must refer to its editors, given that what they have offered us is maybe half of an unedited manuscript. Actually, the cutesiness of the title is a way of deflecting attention from the actual proposition of the book – it’s a confession on the part of the editors that they know this book isn’t what it claims to be. The editors all have, or had until now, good reputations as poets & people. I can’t imagine why they didn’t do their homework, but it’s so manifestly absent throughout this misbegotten venture that this book easily is the disappointment of the year. Plus, as the example of the Michael Benedikt anthology demonstrates, what Saints of Hysteria means above all else is that we’re not likely to have a comprehensive or competent collection of American collaborative poetry for another thirty years at least. That’s tragic.
Labels: anthologies, collaborations, prose poems
Monday, June 11, 2007
Donald Allen
There’s no such thing as a perfect anthology. For one thing, the form is too complex, carrying as it must a world of social dynamics & implications on top of all the “usual” literary ones. For another, editors – all editors – are simply human & prone to all which that implies.
Case in point: Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry , unquestionably the most influential single anthology of the last century. It’s a great book, an epoch-making one in many ways. If you didn’t live anywhere near a location that might carry the small press books of the 1950s & early ‘60s, the Allen anthology was the place where you got to hear what all the fuss was about with the Beatniks, the New York School, the Black Mountain poets & so forth. I still keep my copy of the Grove Press edition right next to the more recent UC Press re-issue. My wife still keeps her copy of the Grove Press edition in one of her bookcases upstairs.
But it’s by no means a perfect book. Only four of its 44 contributors are women & 43 of the poets are white. It would have been a stronger book, and done a better job connecting back to the traditions from which this poetry arose if it had included the work of Louis Zukofsky, Kenneth Rexroth, Kenneth Patchen, Lorine Niedecker or George Oppen, all of whom were active when the first edition appeared in 1960. One could even argue that it might have been a stronger book had it included William Carlos Williams, H.D. or even Ezra Pound, all of whom were still alive in 1960. In the afterword that has been added to the UC Press edition, Allen himself suggests that this is very much the kind of anthology he himself first envisioned:
I visualized leading off with recent work by William Carlos Williams, H.D., e.e. cummings, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, and Wallace Stevens, to be followed by a few poems by Kenneth Rexroth, Kenneth Patchen, and Louis Zukofsky, and then a larger selection of poems by twenty-four of the “new” poets.
According to Allen, it was Charles Olson who balked at this lineup, emphasizing as it did continuity rather than change. A little selective amnesia, omitting rather than incorporating these literary elders, gave the final product a much more radical air than it might otherwise have had. And I suppose that it didn’t hurt that the book leads off with a new version of the Grand Old Man than, say, Pound or Williams, Olson himself taking up the first 38 of the edition’s 386 pages given over to verse (another 70 are allocated to statements of poetics and bio notes, with Olson taking up 20 percent of that).
Where there are exceptions to this prohibition against an “older” aesthetics, every one is in the San Francisco Renaissance section of the book, the second of the volume’s five groupings. Helen Adam, James Broughton, Brother Antoninus & Madeline Gleason all extend out of a tradition that extends more directly from Pound’s old employer, William Butler Yeats. With the plausible exception of Antoninus (William Everson), a Dominican monk whose poetry owes a great debt to Robinson Jeffers, the others were all also confidants of Allen’s closest advisor on this anthology, Robert Duncan. If, as has sometimes been argued, the Allen anthology’s neglect of women can be traced at least partly back to Duncan, it’s worth noting that two of the book’s four female poets fall under this category & that a third, Denise Levertov, was Duncan’s closest female correspondent of all. Without Duncan’s influence, it’s conceivable that the Allen anthology would have been 39 guys and Barbara Guest.¹ But one wouldn’t have had to change the aesthetics or reach of the anthology in the slightest to have included, say, Diane DiPrima, Hettie Jones, Bunny Lang, Mary Fabilli or Lita Hornick. You could have tripled the presence of poets of color by adding Bob Kaufman & Steve Jonas. And you could have had a parallel to the West Coast “exceptions” out of New York if you wanted to be completely fair: Edwin Denby, F.T. Prince, David Schubert.
But this was not the only perceptible omission the Allen anthology made. Notably missing are non- or anti-academic poets who don’t come directly out of the Pound-Williams tradition, including Bern Porter, Bob Brown, Jackson Mac Low & Jerome Rothenberg.² If anything, these poets would have given Allen’s collection a more revolutionary feel than it eventually had. But there were also poets whose writing owed a heavy debt to William Carlos Williams, in particular, but who didn’t share in the vaguely Beat counter-culture that was the unspoken common ground for all the poets in the Allen, such as David Ignatow and Harvey Shapiro, whose absence I suspect drove a wedge between camps. Ignatow, Shapiro & Rexroth are all poets who could easily have been in the Allen who were later taken up as influences by more conservative writers who treat them as integral to a less Anglophiliac, less formalist variant of the School of Quietude. One can only imagine what poets like Phil Levine or journals like the American Poetry Review might have become had they seen the likes of Rexroth et al as part & parcel of the New American Poetry & thus understood their own history differently.
The New American Poetry also didn’t do a great job with its inclusion of younger poets. The two “babies” in the gathering, Ron Loewinsohn & David Meltzer, both turn 70 this year, having had very different careers. Meltzer stayed true to his neo-Beat roots & his recent selected poems, David’s Copy, demonstrates that the Meltzer of the Allen anthology was a solid & worthy selection. However at 23, Loewinsohn was still very much the perfect imitator of William Carlos Williams & not yet much more, a fact that let to considerable derision among his peers that was quite evident on the scene when I first came into it five years later. As Loewinsohn grew up as a poet, his own aesthetic evolved in a more narrative direction, eventually yielding one legit small masterpiece, Against the Silences to Come, a couple of decently sized collections, the most recent of which, Goat Dances, came out in 1976. Having gotten into Harvard after a fairly rough time as a Beat (he & Richard Brautigan were roommates for a time in an automobile), Loewinsohn published two novels, got tenure at Berkeley, and to my knowledge hasn’t published a book now in 20 years. Allen could have done much better by focusing more attention instead on the Spicer Circle (Joanne Kyger, George Stanley, even Harold Dull), some of the younger New York poets (Kathleen Fraser, Ted Berrigan, Ron Padgett) or looking away altogether from the “scenes” to writers like Besmilr Brigham, James L. Weil or Judson Crews.
One could make similar arguments concerning the problematic inclusion of at least six & conceivably as many as ten of the 44 contributors to the Allen anthology. Realistically, tho, one could make a case for the inclusion of every poet there, even Bruce Boyd. A more important question, tho, has to do with the book’s structure. Allen’s decision to divide his collection into “groups” was controversial enough at the time, but I think it had a lot to do with the book’s power & influence. By separating out different modes of the new poetry, Allen made the reading experience of unfamiliar work much easier for readers far from either literary center in the U.S. In essence, this strategy tells you not only who to read, but how to read them. Not devoting a section to Boston, for example, was every bit as important as devoting one to San Francisco, even if the so-called S.F. “Renaissance” is largely a fiction of this volume, one rendered even less intelligible by Allen’s decision to put Duncan – the archetypal San Francisco poet – into the Black Mountain section, as well placing Philip Whalen, Michael McClure & Loewinsohn into the final “independents” grouping.
In addition, there’s an implicit hierarchy of sections that goes well beyond the disproportionate number of pages given to Charles Olson. The hierarchy is: (1) Black Mountain, (2) San Francisco, (3) Beats, (4) New York School & (5) independents. This certainly downgrades the New York poets unfairly, and it misses the already emerging New Western poetry (now sometimes called ecopoetics) that Allen could have acknowledged by placing “SF Renaissance” poet Lew Welch (whose poems in the issue are entirely from his “Chicago period”) alongside Welch's Reed College roomies, Whalen & Snyder, perhaps adding “Black Mountain” poet Ed Dorn. That may have required more forward thinking analysis than anyone could have done at the time, but by the start of Coyote’s Journal by the middle of the next decade & the rise of other New Western poets like James Koller, Bill Deemer, Drum Hadley, John Oliver Simon & Keith Wilson, it was a joining together just waiting to be put on paper. The absence of the New Westerns from the Allen anthology has a lot to do with the ongoing neglect of this writing here nearly a half century later.
But for all of these warts, the Allen anthology is still unquestionably a great book, and it makes sense that it should be the most influential collection of the latter half of – indeed of any point in – the 20th century. Again, Allen himself notes how, in the 1950s,
Oscar Williams’ frequent collections of verse had given contemporary anthologies a bad name.
Which is surely true to my memory of the time (tho I first read Frank O’Hara in one of Williams’ gatherings when I was in high school before I ever saw the Allen). Anthologies like that were pitched, as are those today by Garrison Keillor, Caroline Kennedy & Billy Collins, at people who don’t read poetry & who may well find the simplest piece by Robert Creeley too taxing, too threatening for their noggins. Such readers desire a poetry without questions or ambiguity, which is like weightlifting without weights.
So Allen not only changed poetry, in making all this newfangled stuff widely available, he rehabilitated the genre of the anthology itself. That’s a tremendous achievement. Which is why I want to keep its limitations in mind later this week as I look at a series of new anthologies that have arrived on my desk (or, more accurately, on the floor next to it) over the past few weeks.
¹ Gertrude Stein’s absence from Allen’s original roster is attributable to her death 14 years before, but it definitely narrows the poetic range of what he was proposing.
² Thus one might read the debacle of Poems for the Millennium, Vol. 2, which embarrassingly under-represents the New American Poetry and its participants, as simply a matter of “payback” several decades later.
Labels: anthologies, Donald Allen
Sunday, June 10, 2007
My little informal poll on Friday looked like the sort of election Fidel Castro would love – the Ayes got over 97 percent of the vote, including nearly as many emails as there were remarks in the comments stream. So I guess that answers that.
I should note, since a couple of people drew the wrong conclusion, that there’s no fixed correlation between what I eventually review and the Recently Received list other than that I don’t see the point of putting something on the list if I’ve just actually reviewed it. I decide what I’m going to write about based on whatever I’m thinking about, pondering, at the time. The Gil Ott book I reviewed last Monday is 11 years old. It can take awhile.
Labels: blogging
Saturday, June 09, 2007
§
Kenny Goldsmith’s Traffic
now available
as a book
§
Tim Peterson’s
report
of the Gil Ott
memorial reading
§
For $250,
you can walk across
the Brooklyn Bridge
§
Google’s “Book Project”
(aka Pirates of Silicon Valley)
is joined by
the
& the 11 schools
in the
“Big Ten”
§
Emory offers
a different model
for digitizing its library,
one that respects copyright
§
And then
there is the other extreme,
Mr. Joyce
§
Direct democracy
comes to
Nassau poets
take laureateship
into their own hands
§
A profile of
Ken Babstock
§
Poets & the chronicler
of Avenue A
§
A profile of
Dan Waber
&
Jennifer Hill-Kaucher
§
500 years of Hebrew poetry
from Spain
translated by Peter Cole
& reviewed by
Harold Bloom
§
Slamming at
the House of Hunger
§
The
Poetry Conference
is at it again
§
The Poet Laureate
of
Alexandria, VA
§
Leonard Nathan,
a poet who taught rhetoric at
has died
§
The
No one under 65
need apply
§
What’s new in the dictionary
over on the islands
§
Remembering
Ponatshego Mokane
§
Book Expo
for a small market
§
Music critics
are getting the ax also
§
A review of
Zoe Strauss’
first New York solo show
§
Two photos by
Nick Ut
taken on the same day
35 years apart
Friday, June 08, 2007
A couple of quick questions today.
First, I’m curious as to whether or not anybody finds it useful when I post a list of what’s been recently received. I first put this together at the request of a couple of publishers, but I want to make sure that it’s not something that only publishers find interesting. The comments streams have received a couple of “Holy cow, a new Carla Harryman book” type responses, but thus far that’s all I’ve heard. Use today’s comments stream to let me know what you think.
Second, I’m going to be reading at Mills in
Thursday, June 07, 2007
A few quick notes & photos of last Sunday’s reading in memory of Gil Ott & to celebrate the publication of the first winner of the annual Gil Ott poetry award, Tim Peterson. Robin’s Books, long & thin as it is, isn’t always the best place for a large reading, and there’s a real advantage to sitting up front.
CA Conrad, Tim Peterson, Eli Goldblatt
Craig Allen Conrad, whom nobody in Philly calls Craig (it’s either CA or Conrad) organized this event, not once but twice since a Nor’easter took out the first day in April. It was raining on Sunday too as another, more modest Nor’easter barreled through, tropical depression Barry. Conrad got things started by playing a tape of Gil singing. Tim Peterson read from Since I Moved In, the award winning volume. And Eli Goldblatt, one of Gil’s closest friends, discussed “growing up as poets” with Gil & announced that he’s part of the team putting together a selected writings, that hopes to include not just the poetry & prose, but correspondence as well. (Anyone with correspondence from Gil should contact Eli at eligold @ temple dot edu.)
Alicia Askenase, Joshua Schuster, Frank Sherlock
Alicia Askenase & Josh Schuster read poems dedicated to Gil, then read a joint excerpt from Traffic. Frank Sherlock, looking thinner from his own recent flirtations with the immortal, read from Maize. Conrad then read a paragraph from the introduction to Harryette Mullen’s new collection Recyclopedia that discusses Gil, his importance & his process. Conrad remembered the days when the whole central city of
Jenn McCreary, Chris McCreary, Linh Dinh
Jenn McCreary read from The Yellow Floor, while I and Chris McCreary read from The Whole Note, the work of Gil’s I wrote about last Monday. Then Linh Dinh discussed Gil’s fiction & how it impacted & influenced his own, reading from Gil’s emails (and I believe one of his own) from correspondence that took place when Linh was back in
Ryan Eckes, Bob Perelman
Ryan Eckes gave an example of Gil’s mentoring style, describing how Gil prodded him with the question of how was he going to get away from a normative, comfortable upbringing. He then read the short story “Empathy” from Pact. Bob Perelman read his tribute to Gil – it appears in The Form of Our Uncertainty, the festschrift edited by Kristen Gallagher. Perelman then read some work from the latter part of Traffic. Tim Peterson re-arose to read Gil’s poem “Status.”
Kristen Gallagher, Julia Blumenreich
CAConrad has written a wonderful blog note expanding on his idea, stated midreading, that Gil was as much an anti-mentor as a mentor. Didi Menendez has put a recording of the event up on the MiPoesias site in three files and they can be accessed here, and here, and here.
Tuesday, June 05, 2007
§
Ken Rumble
is the latest addition
to Kate Greenstreet’s
first-book
interview blog
Cold Front review
of aforementioned
first book
& another
from Mathias Svalina
§
§
A profile
(from the UK)
of Jonathan Lethem
§
Your next
pen & paper?
§
Techno tsunami
floods
Book Expo
§
Laureate nixed
over peace poems
§
Edwidge Danticat:
”Marie Micheline”
§
The slam poet
whose day job
is working as
a school security guard
§
Dan Chiasson
on Les Murray
in The New Yorker
§
Robert Pinsky
on burning books
§
23-year-old wins
the Urdd Eisteddfod,
a poetry slam
dating back to
1176
(not a typo)
§
BS from abroad:
” the unmistakable heir
of the Emerson and Whitman
who so ecstatically
hymned flux”
(being of course
the least
Whitman-like author
alive)
§
An assistant editor
for The American Conservative
reviews
a School of Quietude Poet
for Rev. Moon’s
Washington Times
§
A review of
the most pompous
translator
of our time
§
Poetry of
the Six-Day War
§
§
Speed dating for book proposals
§
More newspapers
have begun
laying off arts critics
§
Caribbean poetry
published in Zimbabwe
§
What Ray Bradbury
thought he wrote
§
The Poetry Society of Oklahoma
hosts confab
of the like-minded
§
§
Daniel Libeskind
& the building
as
”open sore”
§
The
Philip Johnson
§
§
Peter Schjeldahl
on
Richard Serra
§
Barry Schwabsky
on
Gordon Matta-Clark
(subscription required)
Labels: links
Recently Received
Books (Poetry)
Christopher Alexander & Kristen Gallagher, Tony Snow’s Band, no publisher listed, no location listed, 2007
Chris Alexander, Kristen Gallagher & Zach Scott, Our National Catastrophe: March-April 2007, no publisher listed, no location listed, 2007
Bruce Andrews, Swoon Noir, Chax Press,
Alicia Askenase, Shirley Shirley, Sona Books,
Rachel Tzvia Back, On Ruins & Return, Shearsman Books,
Bill Berkson, Our
Mairéad Byrne, Talk Poetry,
Julie Carr, Equivocal, Alice James Books,
Albert Flynn DeSilver, Letters to Early Street, La
Buck Downs, Recreational Vehicle, Apathy Press Poets,
Joel Felix, Monaural, Answer Tag Press, Chicago, 2007
Benjamin Friedlander, The Missing Occasion of Saying Yes, Subpress,
Kristen Gallagher, No Goal², no publisher listed, no location listed, 2007
Gregory Kiewiet, In the Company of Words, Past Tents Press,
Mel Nichols, The Beginning of Beauty, Part 1: hottest new ringtones, Edge Books,
Mel Nichols, Day Poems, Edge Books,
Tom Orange, Equal Us, no publisher listed,
Tom Raworth, Caller and Other Pieces, Edge Books,
Sarah Riggs, Water Works, Chax Press,
Chris Toll, Be Light, Apathy Press Poets,
Craig Watson, Secret Histories, Burning Deck,
Books (other)
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, The Flexible Word, Rubba Ducky, no location listed, 2007
Chris Alexander, Kristen Gallagher, Matthias Regan, Neoliberal Poetry, no publisher listed,
Steve Lacy, Conversations, edited by Jason Weiss, Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2006
Jana Martin, Russian Lover and Other Stories, A Yeti Book published in association with Verse Chorus Press,
Anthologies
Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry, edited by Denise Duhamel, Maureen Seaton & David Trinidad, Soft Skull Press,
Lust for Life: On the Writings of Kathy Acker, edited by Amy Scholder, Carla Harryman, Avital Ronnel, Verso Press,
Journals
Abraham Lincoln #1,
Best of Café Café: Summer 2007, A Didi Menendez Publication, no location given, 2007. Includes AnnMarie Eldon, Amy King, Birdie Jaworsky,
Ocho number 9 number 9 number 9 number 9 number 9,
Pleiades 27:2,
Sal Mimeo #7,
CDs
Liz Downing, Rebby Sharp, Mark Jickling, Chris Mason, Alcman – Old Songs, no publisher listed, 2005
Liz Downing, Rebby Sharp, Mark Jickling, Chris Mason, plus 13 others, 19 Old Songs, Race of Bees Records, no location listed, 2007
Works all received after May 28th
Labels: Recently Received
Monday, June 04, 2007
It’s hard to imagine that it’s been seventeen years since Gil Ott was the writer in residence at the Headlands Institute in some old military barracks that you get to through a little tunnel from the outskirts of
I didn’t actually meet Gil for another year or two when, one day when I was supposed to be having lunch with Charles Bernstein in
So when Gil came out to the Bay Area to do a residency as the Headlands Institute in 1990, there was an undercurrent of satisfaction in it for him – he was poet returning to a previous home as a successful writer. Since Gil often had a disproportionate sense of how much power the
While Gil was at the Headlands, he composed the first three-fourths of a work called The Whole Note, later to be published as a small book by Manuel Brito’s Zasterle Press on the
Each page is composed of between four and six smaller sections. In the book, they look like paragraphs, tho only the first begins at the start of a sentence with a capital letter. In the anthology, which uses a page larger than the 4-by-6 inch Zasterle edition, they look more like lines, since the shorter ones down turn back again at the right hand margin. In both places, any line that runs over is printed as tho it were prose.
What it looks like in the book is that a paragraph, invariably of seven or eight sentences, is divided into these subdivisions, so that each page is thus one “true” (if not physical) paragraph. But this isn’t so much the case in the anthology, where each “line” looks more independent. Thus consider the first page of what in The Practice of Outside is called “Fourth Fourth”:
Moving, variant ornithography of those uninitiated
made into memory by the me briefly incarnate. Full of myself on successive nights dense and alone sings
you back. Need keeps the book of dying open, the language common after all. Relieved, the task finally changing prompts tapping my reserve
feeling, now, wise to its edge. Where are you risk any detail of what’s in me, having been tricked by the image of a man. Softly paint the intuit
applications under authority of breathing. I drive this one, I get winded
calendar’s familiar, speed and abruption.
Now consider the same passage from what is called “4/4” in the book, where a tighter page uses justified margins:
Moving, variant ornithography of those uninitiated
made into memory by the me briefly incarnate. Full of myself on successive nights dense and alone sings
you back. Need keeps the book of dying open, the language common after all. Relieved, the task finally changing prompts tapping my reserve
feeling, now, wise to its edge. Where are you risk any detail of what’s in me, having been tricked by the image of a man. Softly paint the intuit
applications under authority of breathing. I drive this one, I get winded
calendar’s familiar, speed and abruption.
Actually, I can’t quite capture this in HTML since the Zasterle page uses mid-word hyphens to tighten the kerning even further. But you get the idea.
In the first three sections of The Whole Note, Ott sculpts his phrases – they sometimes build into sentences, but more often sweep this way & that, reaching a climax rather than a conclusion – from what he observed at the Headlands – kestrels appear – and his reading, which at that moment focused on Santeria & voo doo (the one book he credits by name, in a footnote to a page in “3/4” is Louis Mars’ The Crisis of Possession in Voodoo). The fourth section, composed back in
Much of “4/4” brings together issues implicit in the first three sections, as movement is contrasted with terms like debility and even Cripple. A major concern, perceptible but not tated, is whether one can accept unconditional love if one has issues with oneself. The argument makes perfect sense for a man who would have multiple kidney transplants in his life, every one of which eventually would fail. But a writer’s presence need not be reduced to or limited by the body, as true for Gil Ott as it was for Larry Eigner. The poem’s final page is about as close to pure closure as the post-avant Ott would allow himself:
Prone to the observance, a formal end only, blurred with or without morphine decides to live. I have made a mistake, a meandering
stasis, down a notch and starting over. Someone else’s surgery pulled a knot out, left a man handled roughly
bumped and thrown what dirt brackets. Possessed of this violence, a plea remains. Fed on seed here, a small black bird
far and still admissible. I will build a body of utterance, that fooled me. The odor will stay, and I
will walk away.
I am aware, as I think everyone at the reading on Sunday must have been, that Gil Ott is somebody who needs to have his big collected poems out, because there’s a marvel there that every reader I know could benefit from. This body of utterance stands tall & strong.
¹ Pew recipients over the years include Linh Dinh, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Jena Osman, Lamont Steptoe, Bob Perelman, Mytili Jagannathan, Teresa Leo, Homer Jackson, Major Jackson, Molly Russakoff & yours truly, a list that I think suggests that Ott was almost certain to have received a Pew at some point, if only he’d applied.
Drawing of Gil Ott by Christopher Webster courtesy of Artvoice.
Labels: Gil Ott
Saturday, June 02, 2007
photo © 2006 by Gordon Ball (Courtesy of Jacket)
A fabulous
photo essay
on Allen Ginsberg & Co.
by Gordon Ball
§
50 years ago this week,
Howl
was busted
in Britain
§
A history & exhibition
of
The Fugs
§
The dog & pony show
is in
&
on line
§
What’s your font?
§
The number of titles
published each year
is nearing
300,000
§
Gabriel García Márquez
goes home
§
§
Magee’s Emerson
as the founding father
of flarf
§
Talking with Jack Mapanje,
poet & one-time
political prisoner
of
§
Asked
if they’d read any
good books lately,
Dave Eggers
lists C.D. Wright
&
Edwidge Danticat
lists Nikki Giovanni
§
Talking with
George Bowering
§
William Meredith,
one of the quietest
of the School of Quietude,
has died
§
Geoffrey G. O’Brien
on
John Ashbery’s “Clepsydra”
§
§
The importance
of destroying a language
(your own)
§
Mark Harris
has died
§
Talking with
Eleni Sikelianos
§
On the Road
(Swiss version)
§
Interfaces + Recursion
= Language?
§
Talking with
Orhan Pamuk
§
Against
the idea
of poetry
§
Paul Portuges
on 2Pac
§
Talking with
Allison Knowles
§
An oral history
of the
Subtext
reading series
§
More on the life
& death
of
Sarah Hannah
§
Talking with
Billy
Collins
§
Howard Zinn
on the end
of newspaper
book reviews
§
drops its critics
The Atlanta
Journal-Constitution
defends
its arts coverage
while it’s laid-off
book reviewer
gets a job
§
BEA
considers
the future (if any)
of book reviews
§
Who controls
an author’s
estate?
§
The close connection
between
business & poetry
§
The Poetry Foundation
wins a webby
§
Novelists slum
in the New Gutter
§
Dialog as critique:
on
Michael Rothenberg
§
PENNsound
makes it to
the leader’s quadrant
of
”Approval Matrix”
§
§
Dada, Gary Snyder
& environmental action
§
A profile of
Nancy Botkin
§
Jim Behrle
on the website of Poetry:
”The Ex-Laureates”
§
Getting wild & crazy
at Poetry
§
Giving up poetry
for politics
§
§
A profile of
David Malouf
§
Where are the children’s books
denouncing gay rights,
affirmative action
& promoting gun ownership?
§
Why Hal Meyerson
is the best
political columnist
in the
§
Yoshi’s
pulls
a commemorative
but not representative
CD
§
Talking with
Richard Serra
& a profile
of the retrospective
at MoMA
§
A seriously
pre-digital
camera
§
Joe Goode
in
Humansville
§
Yoko Ono
eats a corgi
Friday, June 01, 2007
Sunday, June 3,
Robin’s Bookstore
215-735-9600
Rained out by the Nor’easter on Tax Day, we’re gonna try this again because it’s worth doing right. Ken Rumble (
So let me reiterate: more than any other individual, Gil Ott is the person responsible for the strength of the poetry community in
One way to carry on Gil’s work and his name is to publish a work each year that demonstrates the same principles Gil worked so tirelessly for in life. Tim Peterson is the recipient of the First Annual Gil Ott Book Award for his book Since I Moved In (Chax Press, 2007), selected by series editors Charles Alexander, Eli Goldblatt, Myung Mi Kim and Nathaniel Mackey.
We will also be celebrating Gil Ott's work and life directly. Those participating include:
Alicia Askenase
Julia Blumenreich
CAConrad
Linh Dinh
Ryan Eckes
Kristen Gallagher
Eli Goldblatt
Chris McCreary
Jenn McCreary
Bob Perelman
Joshua Schuster
Frank Sherlock
Ron Silliman
Click HERE for Traffic.
Click HERE for The Form of Our Uncertainty, a festschrift for Gil.
Click HERE for 2 audio clips from Frequency, including “The Moon Does Not Run on Gasoline”
Click HERE for audio from a tribute to Gil at Writers House.
Click HERE for a video of Gil.
Click HERE for Gil's last interview.
Click HERE at WIKIPEDIA, they're looking for help creating Gil's page.
This blog note lovingly plagiarized from CAConrad’s Upcoming Events.
Labels: Gil Ott, Readings, Tim Peterson
